


Lived to Tell

by schweet_heart



Series: MASH Fic [2]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 10:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4517910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, Trapper heads to Maine to pay his respects to an old friend. Spoilers for 4x05: <i>The Late Captain Pierce</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lived to Tell

_**piano (softly)** _

 

In the end it doesn't matter, because all of the threads lead back to the same place. Trapper has the sense that he's unravelling time, picking apart the places where everything went wrong and following the loops back with every mile that passes outside his window.

 

It's mostly the countryside that does it; he's never been to Maine before, except in dreams, but there is a lightness in the air that is familiar. The land here has a crispness to it, curling in on itself at the edges with bright colours and sharp contrasts, and the closer he gets to _there_ the more it _feels_ like him, even down to the fierce scarlet of the turning leaves and the contradictory stillness of the bay, a balance of opposites, vibrant, passionate. Only at home could death be beautiful. _And that's why I'm here, isn't it, Hawk?_ He asks the space in his mind that still speaks with Hawkeye's voice. Because of death; because of Korea. So maybe it's fitting, somehow.

 

He traces the threads to the source, relearning the pathway back to the beginning. He says to himself: he used to walk down this street every day. He went to school there. He used to post letters here, and stay to chat up the post lady, and sometimes he'd walk down to the water just to sit and look, because before the war he was a jester with the soul of a poet, and after the war –

 

There had been no after the war.

 

 

##

 

_**affettuoso (tenderly)** _

 

Hawkeye Pierce, also known as Benjamin Franklin Pierce, had been killed in Korea only a few weeks after Trapper himself had left. Sometimes, when he'd had a few too many drinks and his mind slipped off its leash to go wandering, he wondered if somehow that had been the moment of critical mass – if his leaving had tipped the balance of things in Korea and whatever charm it was that had protected Hawkeye until then left with him.

 

Other times, when he was walking (wobbling) along that fine line between drunk and unconscious, he knew somehow that it was more than that; that it was Hawkeye who had tipped the scales, weighted the odds against himself. Hawkeye was – had been – a combination of brilliance, insanity and introspection, and war had turned him first angry and then maudlin. He liked to play dice with death – only this time, death had cheated.

 

Trapper heard the news through the friend of a friend, a fluke, late one evening after a long but still deliriously satisfying day at the hospital. To work within four walls was a luxury he could not get over; to be clean, to be safe, to have a family to come home to. The shine of novelty had briefly blotted out the shadow of Korea, until that small slip of paper and a terse paragraph of printed words brought it all crashing down around him. _We regret to inform you._

 

He had been a coward, then – had cut all ties to the war and to his memories by locking them away in a box and pretending it was someone else's problem. Louise had not understood; people died in a war, she said, as if death were something to be respected, as if it could take whoever it willed. And he couldn't explain how it _wasn't right_ that Hawkeye should die like that (though he never did find out how it happened, he assumed a bullet – aimed right at the heart, because with Hawkeye you couldn't miss), so he didn't try.

 

##

 

_**ma non troppo (but not too much)** _

 

He sits in the car across the street from a house he knows only from photographs. It is clearer, in reality – the eaves are sharper and the edges cleaner. It looks like a doctor's house should look. He wants to go up to the door and be healed by the house where Hawkeye had spent his formative years. Instead, he sits in the car, eyes closed, unwilling to go forward the way he should but unable to turn back.

 

_Should pay his respects; should visit the grave; should have the chance to say goodbye._

 

He's beginning to hate the word “should,” and all the things it means he hasn't done.

 

##

 

_**con amore (with love)** _

 

The strands are gathering now; bright, thin lines from birth to death and back again. Trapper can feel them closing around him, soft touches on his skin like spiderwebs, and he feels the tug in every part of his body before he even sees the door open. He looks up.

 

The tall, whippet-thin shadow of a man slices the light in the doorway and Hawkeye Pierce steps outside. His hair is greyer than Trapper remembers, face leaner, and although he is physically thinner there seems to be more weight to his bones because he moves less fluidly, the way broken limbs sometimes stiffen up if not set right. But it is none of this that arrests Trapper's breath in his throat and has him fumbling for the door of the car. It's his eyes. Like pieces of sky, they are shadowed but still vital: an irrefutable sign that he is indeed alive.

 

“Hawkeye?” Trapper says, and it comes out as a question.

 

The man is too far away to possibly hear – across the street, or maybe across two whole years and into the past – but he turns to look anyway as Trapper unfolds himself from the front seat of the car. Trapper knows he's seen him, because he goes still and his head comes up, and maybe he says his name because his lips are moving, but whatever he's saying gets swept away by the wind.

 

He wants to ask _how?_ But it doesn't really matter. He knows the painful brightness on his friend's face is reflected in his own, and he doesn't even remember crossing the road, just that moments later they're meeting halfway in a hug that knocks his breath from his lungs, and Hawkeye is laughing – _Hawkeye_ is _laughing_ – and they're laughing and laughing...

 

“I thought you were dead,” he says, explanation and apology.

 

“I was,” Hawkeye mumbles into his hair. “I was. But I got better.”

 


End file.
